In memory of the Ottoman court

A Swiss musician sets out to restore the purity of Turkey's musical lore

“NEITHER the sweets of Damascus, nor the face of the Arab.” This Turkish adage sums up the disdain modern Turks have long expressed for their Arab neighbours, a disdain that became fashionable with the founding of the republic by Ataturk, who in his zeal to make Turkey Western set about erasing all traces of its Ottoman past, including its links to the Arab world. The court music of the sultans was not spared and soon was buried in a layer of Western instruments like the violin and the piano. The result, according to Julien Jalal Eddine Weiss, an expert on classical Arab and Sufi music, was like “using African bongos in a Mozart sonata”.

Mr Weiss, a Franco-Swiss convert to Islam, has been based in Aleppo for the past two decades, refining his mastery of the qanun (the Arab zither) and playing with the masters of Arab classical music. He moved to Istanbul last year with the mission of returning Turkish music to its roots, which he argues are undeniably Arab.

It is a daunting task in a country where in the late 1940s Egyptian film music was banned because of its influence on Turkish popular songs. These days the quality of Turkish music is measured by its success at the Eurovision song contest. Turkey's winning entry in 2004 was an up-tempo pop tune with English lyrics.

But Mr Weiss's arrival in Istanbul coincided with the burgeoning of Turkish curiosity about their Ottoman and Sufi roots. Ottoman styles and cuisine are increasingly de rigueur. In Beyoglu, the hub of Istanbul's alternative art scene, street musicians are trading in their guitars for ouds (an oriental string instrument) and the ney (a flute traditionally played by dervishes).

From this fertile mix, Mr Weiss has added three Turkish musicians to his mainly Arab al-Kindi ensemble. The fruit of this collaboration is an ambitious double album “Parfums Ottomans” that purports to render Ottoman court music in its purest form. The virtuosity of Mr Weiss and his fellow musicians is beyond doubt. “Parfums Ottomans” is an intoxicating journey back in time: it is easy to visualise the sultans reclining on their divans smoking water pipes as they listen (much as Mr Weiss, clad in oriental pyjamas, does on the pink velour floor cushions of his Istanbul home). The complexity of the music, plaintive and repetitive, shines through, thanks to the uncluttered performance of his ensemble.

Mr Weiss sees no contradiction in the fact that it is he rather than a Turk who is restoring the purity of Turkey's musical lore. Apart from the oral tradition, he relies on two 17th-century manuscripts as his main sources for reconstructing the music of the Ottoman court. One was written by Wojciech Bobowski, a Polish Jew who converted to Islam. The other was transcribed by a Moldavian Christian, Prince Dimitrie Cantemir, who studied music in Istanbul.

But Mr Weiss, who has performed to critical acclaim at the Carnegie Hall in New York and the Théâtre de la Ville in Paris, has yet to find a Turkish sponsor. “[The Turks] have no interest in me,” he shrugs. Might they find this interloper presumptuous? He responds with true Sufi detachment: “It doesn't really matter.”